Everyday words and the character of prose in nineteenth-century Britain / Jonathan Farina.

Author
Farina, Jonathan, 1979- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Description
xxii, 286 pages ; 24 cm.

Availability

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks PR868.L35 F37 2017 Browse related items Request

    Details

    Subject(s)
    Library of Congress genre(s)
    Getty AAT genre
    Series
    Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 107. [More in this series]
    Summary note
    "Everyday Words is an original and innovative study of the stylistic tics of canonical novelists including Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. Jonathan Farina shows how ordinary locutions such as 'a decided turn', 'as if', and 'that sort of thing' condense nineteenth-century manners, tacit aesthetics and assumptions about what counts as knowledge. Writers recognized these recurrent 'everyday words' as signatures of 'character'. Attending to them reveals how many of the fundamental forms of characterizing fictional characters also turn out to be forms of characterizing objects, natural phenomena and inanimate, abstract things, like physical laws, the economy and legal practice. Ultimately, this book revises what 'character' meant to nineteenth-century Britons by respecting the overlapping, transdisciplinary connotations of the category"-- Provided by publisher.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references (pages 215-280) and index.
    Contents
    • Darwin's view from Todgers's: 'A decided turn' for character and common words
    • Inductive 'attentions': Jane Austen in 'particular' and in 'general'
    • 'Our skeptical as if': conditional analogy and the comportment of Victorian prose
    • 'Something' in the way realism moves: Middlemarch and oblique character references
    • 'Whoever explains a 'but'': tact and friction in Trollope's reparative fiction.
    ISBN
    • 9781107181632 (hardback)
    • 1107181631 (hardback)
    LCCN
    2017020502
    OCLC
    987426245
    Statement on language in description
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